There is a massive amount of information available on the internet, which can be extremely useful to the user in the search for relevant knowledge that pertains to an area of interest. The key to using this information, however, is to find an efficient way to sort through the massive amounts of information to find what is relevant. Search engines do not really search the world wide web directly. Instead, search engines typically search a database of the full text of web pages automatically harvested from the billions of web pages that are available on the internet. Web browsers such as Google, Yahoo! and ask.com can be used to find a plethora of websites relevant to the user's query—sometimes over a million sites. However, these web browsers do little to extract the relevant information from these sites for presentation to the user.
Search engine databases are selected and built by computer robot programs that are often referred to as spiders. These spiders “crawl” the web, finding pages for potential inclusion by following the links in the pages that the spiders already have in their database (i.e., already “know about”). Spiders cannot use judgment; that is, they cannot “decide” to look something up and see what is on the web about it. If a web page is never linked to from any other page, search engine spiders cannot find it. The only way a brand new page (a web page that no other web page has previously linked to) can get into a search engine is for its Uniform Resource Locator (URL), or web address, to be sent to the search engine companies with a request that the new page be included.
After spiders find web pages, they pass the web page URL's on to another computer program for “indexing.” The other computer program identifies the text, the links, and the other content in the page and stores it in the search engine database's files so that the database can be searched by keyword and whatever more advanced approaches are offered, and the page will be found if the search matches the web page content. Once the user hits upon the right keyword, the search engine finds the web page URL and presents the URL for review by the user. But, the user must still open the URL link and review the website for the relevant material. If the material is not readily apparent, the user must often search within the webpage to find the relevant material. This can be very inconvenient and time consuming.
In view of the above, it is an object of the present invention to provide systems and methods for manipulating search engine results that use a query that has been constrained by the user using natural language specifications. It is another object of the present invention to provide systems and methods for extracting relevant information from databases that display only the relevant information for review by the user. It is yet another object of the present invention to provide systems and methods for manipulating search engine results that rank and prioritize plain text snippets of search results for review by the user. Another object of the present invention is to provide systems and methods for manipulating search engine results that obviate the need to further search the list of web pages for relevant information. It is another object of the present invention to provide systems and methods of manipulating search engine results that extract relevant text from database search results and present the relevant text to the user without requiring the user to actually review the search results.